Patching Process Outlined by Josh Olin of Treyarch

The web is abuzz with talk of the many problems that plague the Call of Duty Black Ops Multiplayer. There have already been many patches released in the short amount of time that the game has been out, yet the community remains unhappy. This has not been lost on Treyarch; their community manager, Josh Olin, posted an outline of the patching process in their forums here

If true, it is a somewhat eye opening revelation for the average gamer. Obviously the company needs time to test and fix problems, but Olin’s review claims an average 1 month waiting period between full title patch releases.

Do you believe his outline is true to the industry, or is this just an attempt to quiet the criticism?

I don’t really have any issues with the game, other then the respawning. Opposing team players respawing right behind me or personally getting respawned right next to the other team and getting blitzed.

I didn’t have that problem in MW2, but respawing completely on the opposite side of the board and having to catch up to the action is the other side of the sword in this argument.

It is completely understandable that patching takes time, however he discusses the extensive testing that takes place yet the first patched caused more problems (ps3) than existed beforehand. If full testing happened why are consoles freezing etc? Host migration worse than MW2 but uses the same technology. Why was it not tested more before launch, not many industries can release unfinished work. Why did they not do a beta? Too much commercialisation and too little care for the customer. This game has got too big and to some extent had too big an ego to care about some complaints…I welcome his communication, but I think for a lot of people, including myself, it’s too little too late. He could had said that he understands our issues and they are working tirelessly to fix them….he didn’t, he basically said to have patience that these things take time.

I completely understand the need to have a one month development cycle for patches. I don’t have an issue with that. I just wish that the patches actually fixed things.

Djtokes84: It doesn’t use the same technology as MW2. We’d be a lot further ahead if that were the case. In fact, Black Ops is a sequel to WaW, not MW2. For some strange reason that I can’t fathom, there is NOT a common code base between the Treyarch and IW offerings anymore.

Blackstaffer. I stand corrected, when u play BOps it feels like a rehashed version of MW2, consider the loading screens, the party system, the classes, annimation etc etc, it’s all the same as MW2 but doesn’t quite work properly. I welcome the lack of quickscope, reduce campers and restrict the one man army, but that seems to be all that’s on offer. All that cud have been a small patch by infinity ward. It amazes me that they don’t share tech, I understand what activision is doing I.e. Making them compete but it’s hurting the gamers and surely COD is a brand and we should be rating it on that, we shouldn’t care or to some extent even know who made it. I like COD but also like being respected as a customer and it’s not happening. Josh it’s jus explaining a process…doesn’t help fix anything. The community needs better communication, telling us to wait and that it takes time to patch doesn’t cut it, we should know why it’s freezing PS3s, why it can’t migrate hosts etc, we bought the product, if it doesn’t work as intended we should know why. I think Josh had the wrong attitude in post.

They are not worried about fixing the PS3 version. They are another company that Bill Gates has paid a fortune to and now they (Treyarche) have their heads stuck up Bill Gates ass. Its all about the money, that is all Treyarche cares about. Thats why they made a version of Black Ops on every system, to maximize their profit and now that they sold a turd to millions of people, they could care less.
Anybody that follows JD on Twitter will read him writing challenges for people to complete and for people to send the videos in for him to watch. Thats what JD is doing, watching 360 players videos and playing the game himself on the 360. He is not the least bit worried about whats going on with the PS3.

that is such a bloody cop out, and why is he posting in the PS3 section, get us a community manager who actually plays the PS3 and feels our pain. Otherwise keep making your stupid video challenges for Xbox and gtfo.

I suspect many people don’t understand what is involved in the whole development process. Basically, what’s happening is that people are reporting a boatload of bugs in multiplayer. Treyarch tracks these bugs and prioritizes them. The developers then fix these bugs. The testers most likely have a suite of tests that they run each time a fixed build is ready. Such tests should be designed to verify the bugs are indeed fixed, and that the fixes don’t actually break something else in the game. It’s a vicious cycle, and can take a long time to release a build that the testers finally sign off on. A month sounds like a long time, but I’m sure there are reasons for it. Point releases for the software company I used to work for took anywhere between 12 and 18 months.

What I wanna Know is why they shit on us the ps3 player. I asked him in a twitter today why they shit on us by giving us an inferior version. We don’t get the launch into multiplayer shortcut like the xbox gets, and out frame rate sucks.

My best friend has Black ops on both 360 and ps3 and the 360 version runs way way way way smoother frame rate wise and there is way way way less lag… Even on the same network that the ps3 version lags on. Both systems are wired and running side by side, the ps3 lags and has bad frame rates continually.